Again, sometimes only people who work with ILE CL would know the difference between a homework question and a legitimate one. If you see comments marking a question as homework and you disagree, let us know and we’ll leave it up.

I do remember that question; after taking another look at it, I came to the decision that it was a homework question. Even though you provided a great answer (I remember that too), because a couple of other members noted that it looked an awful lot like a homework or exam question, I couldn’t keep it on the site.

This is one of the tougher issues of moderating a forum like this one — sometimes legitimate questions come in that still aren’t meant for this community, and sometimes those questions get answered [I]really[/I] well. But even if the question gets a good answer, that doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t belong.

It would be the same as getting a question about a car motor (believe me, we get those too) and someone on the site just happening to be a mechanic and answering the question. We’re doing our best as moderators to eliminate these types of questions before they even reach you so as to not waste your time.

Our best advice to you would be to hold off on answering questions that look like homework (though in this case it seems you thought it was legitimate, and maybe you were right), and feel free to e-mail us if you aren’t sure or you notice something awry. We’re always open to hearing suggestions about how we could improve this functionality without hurting the community’s efficiency or our strong ties to search engines.

I’d love to talk about this further with you via e-mail, or perhaps open a debate about it on the site. Thanks for your feedback, Tom, I appreciate it!

Jenny

]]>By: TomLiottahttp://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/itke-community-blog/hey-where-did-my-question-go/#comment-125
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:14:06 +0000http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/itke-community-blog/?p=1127#comment-125I wondered about a [A href=”http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/itanswers/can-we-write-a-factorial-program-in-clle”]question that disappeared yesterday[/A]. (Link no longer valid, of course.) I couldn’t see anything wrong with it, and it presented an interesting problem that I expected could find wide interest while illustrating a useful technique. Is there any way to find out why it was removed? The time that I spent creating and submitting an answer became wasted.
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